T I. 



THE COAST OF MAINE AND ITS FISHERIES. 



A. GENERAL REVIEW OF MAINE AND ITS FISHERIES. 



1. DESCRIPTIVE AND STATISTICAL RECAPITULATION OF THE FISHERIES OF 



THE STATE. 



LOCATION AND EARLY SETTLEMENT. The State of Maine includes an area of 32,000 square 

 miles in the extreme northeastern corner of the United States. It is claimed that the region was 

 visited by the Northmen in the latter part of the tenth century. An attempt was made to settle a 

 colony on Neutral Island, on the Saint Croix River, under a grant from the King of Fraiice, in 1604. 

 In 1G13, French Jesuits established a mission at Mount Desert Island, but they were driven away 

 by the English the following year. About this time Capt. John Smith with a company of fisher- 

 men took possession of Monhegan Island, from which point he made visits to different portions of 

 the coast for the purpose of making maps of the region. In 1620 the territory was granted to 

 the Plymouth Company, and three years later the first permanent settlement within the pres- 

 ent limits of the State was established near the month of the Piscataqtia River. From that 

 time onward the province grew in importance and many colonists were soon comfortably settled 

 within its borders. The eastern portion was for many years under the control of the French, who 

 made little effort to develop its resources, but the western part was from the first in the possession 

 of the English, and by 1650 a number of important settlements, some of them founded fifteen to 

 twenty years earlier, were scattered along its shores. 



The Massachusetts colony obtained control of the region west of the Keuncbec River in 1G77: 

 nine years later its jurisdiction was extended to the Penobscot, and in 1C91 all of the territory west 

 of the Saint Croix, as well as Nova Scotia, was transferred to it by the Provincial charter. The 

 treaty of 1783 ceded to Massachusetts all of Maine's present territory, and she continued her super- 

 intendence over it until 1820, when Maine became a separate State, at which time it had a population 

 of over 298,000. In 1860 the State had 628,279 inhabitants, the number increasing to 648,936 in 

 1880. 



PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE COAST. Geologically considered, the region is one of 

 peculiar interest. With unimportant exceptions, as at Perry on the Passamaquoddy and Rockland 

 on the Penobscot, the coast is one huge bed of metamorphic rocks, including granites, syenites, 

 and mica schists. These are everywhere scraped and grooved by huge glaciers which descended 

 from the northward and extended many miles into the sea, and which were of sufficient thickness 

 entirely to cover Mount Desert and of such weight as to plow out enormous valleys and ravines in 

 the hard granite floor. The principal furrows and ridges extend nearly north and south, the shore- 

 line being made up of a series of long rocky peninsulas separated by deep and narrow fjords, which 



7 



